Orpheus Complex

Tuesday, 24 October 2017

I’m just back from a weekend
in Berlin, to interview Antoine Tamestit about his recording of Jörg Widmann’s
Viola Concerto – look out for the feature in the February 2018 issue of TheStrad.
While there, I got the opportunity to sit in on recording sessions for the
coupling on the CD, Tamestit’s arrangements of Widmann’s Violin and Cello Duos,
some viola and cello, others for violin and viola. Much of my work involves
writing and editing reviews of classical recordings, but most talk about the
actual production process is speculative, so the visit to Teldex Studios proved
very interesting. What follows is a photo diary of the day, showing how it’s
done, with no secrets left untold – though when I made that threat to producer
Martin Sauer, he laughed ‘we have no secrets!’, so I’m holding him to that.

The studio is in a quiet residential
suburb in the south-west of the city. Like many recording studios, it was
previously a ballroom.

The interior walls are a
patchwork of acoustic panelling and exposed battens, where the reverberation
has been fine tuned for optimum resonance. The main control room is on the
former stage (see the ominous window below), though for this session a smaller
room was used, more convenient for chamber work.

The producer for the day,
Martin Sauer (below centre) is a legend in the industry (check out this list of credits). He works both for the studio itself, which is an independent company,
and for Harmonia Mundi, for whom this recording was being made. Martin
explained that the name, Teldex, reflected the studio’s history (I’m
paraphrasing his excellent English – he spoke English to me, German to the
engineer and French to the artists, all fluently). The studio had previously belonged
to Teldec, but became independent in 2002 (plenty more about the company that
their website, http://www.teldexstudio.de/)
taking several producers with it, including Martin.

Since then, it’s done well
for awards, and this display of Grammys greets visitors at the door, about half
of them are Martin’s.

But down to business. The
schedule looked punishing, nine movements, all in the can by the end of the
day. I was surprised how musical Martin’s input was in the proceedings, making
regular suggestions, mostly about balance but also about more subtle interpretive
issues. He doesn’t do much contemporary music, he tells me, as their isn’t the commercial
demand, about once every two years. So, for this session he had to rely on the
performers, as they’d worked with the composer, then he added ‘ ... of course,
if it was Brahms ... ’ Even so, as the
recording got under way, he was really getting into the music ...

... and annotating thoroughly
...

A brief lunch break offered
a chance to look around the place. All sorts of strange things collect in
recording studios. At a stretch of the imagination, I could think of reasons
for the barometer, but the vintage motorbike?

Martin showed me the studio
archive – very impressive! Every session is recorded onto a 500GB hard drive,
which is filed in one of these boxes along with the annotated score. The
artists named on these box spines are astonishing; everybody who’s anybody has
been through here at some stage.

Here are a few more images.
The picture at the bottom is of Martin (right) with the artists (L-R) Antoine Tamestit,
Marc Bouchkov and Bruno Philippe. Thanks to them for their hospitality, and
good luck with the edit, as they say. Look out for the album, on Harmonia Mundi
early next year – it should be a good one, it sounded great in the studio –
and, as mentioned above, my interview with Antoine in The Strad next February.

Wednesday, 4 October 2017

I’ve just received another excellent review for our
Schnittke Studies volume, this time by Ivan Moody in the Musicological Annual.
Thanks Ivan for your perceptive reading and encouraging words, and for the
contributions to my (still mercifully brief!) errata list. (The review can be found here in pdf for easier reading.)

Thursday, 3 August 2017

I’m more used to reviewing than being
reviewed, so I’ve been awaiting coverage of our Schnittke Studies volume with some trepidation. But if this first
review is anything to go by, I needn’t have worried. It’s by Ian Power and
appears in the July 2017 issue of Tempo (Vol. 71, Issue 281, pp. 114-115). Thanks to
Ian for his sympathetic and perceptive reading. I’m particularly pleased that
his judgement throughout is framed in relation to the book’s stated aims.

I hope CUP don’t mind my reproducing
the whole review here - if anyone from
the publisher is reading this and does take issue, drop me a line and I’ll take
it down.

Sunday, 4 June 2017

This conference
was convened to celebrate the legacy of Professor Alexander Ivashkin, and its
two days seemed woefully brief, given his huge range of interests and
activities. We left with the feeling that even a week would have barely
scratched the surface. Fortunately, the papers and recitals at least touched on
every important aspect of his career, giving a good overview of his research
and performing interests. The event was hosted by Goldsmiths, where Ivashkin
served for many years as Chair of Performance and Postgraduate Studies as well
as Director of the Centre for Russian Music. It was organised, with typical
energy and boundless enthusiasm, by his widow, fellow cellist Natalia
Pavlutskaya, who was ably assisted by Elena Artamonova, one of Ivashkin’s many
former students at the event. An honourable mention, too, to Imogen
Burman-Mitchell, Events Manager at Goldsmiths, for organising the logistics of
five varied recitals over the two days, all of which ran without incident, and
even began and ended on schedule – no mean feat.

Elena Artamonova
opened proceedings with a broad survey of Ivashkin’s career, an excellent
framework to which later presentations could add detail. She was the only
speaker to address Ivashkin’s career in Moscow in the 1970s and 80s, and her
discussion of his doctoral work on Charles Ives was particularly interesting.
I’ve long fostered an ambition to tackle Ivashkin’s monograph Charles Ives and
the Music of the 20th Century (1991), and this put me one step closer to
dusting off the Russian dictionary and getting to it. Artamonova pointed out
that the book is about far more than just Ives’ music, and the broad,
contextual nature of Ivashkin’s research in general was a recurring theme of
the papers that followed. Another angle of Ivashkin’s personality was explored
by Olga Tabachnikova in her ‘Alexander Ivashkin and the Theme of Russian
Irrationalism’. Anybody who knew Ivashkin personally will know that esoteric
knowledge systems—Theosophy and Chinese astrology, for example—where sources
endless fascination to him, so it was fitting to hear about this aspect of his
personality, especially within the context of his writings on Russian culture.

Despite his
undeniable authority on Ives, Penderecki, and many other 20th-century
composers, Ivashkin is likely to remain most closely associated with the music
of Alfred Schnittke. Fittingly, then, several papers discussed Ivashkin’s work
on Schnittke, his publications, of course, but also his performances and
recordings. Svetlana Savenko (the only visitor from Russia to reach
us, visa complications preventing several others), talked about how Ivashkin
had studied the funereal aspects of Schnittke’s music of the 1970s, Victoria
Adamenko (in absentia, I read her paper) looked at Schnittke’s Pasternak
settings, Paolo Eustachi Ivaskhin’s performances of the Second Cello Concerto,
and I gave a survey of the Schnittke-related events that Ivashkin had organised
in the UK in the years since the composer’s death.

The conference
also aimed to reflect the sheer breadth of Ivashkin’s academic interests, and
so included several presentations of new research in areas close to his heart,
if not directly related to his work. Vladimir Marchenkov presented a theory of
music as ‘Ludic Transformation of Time’, and
Razia Sultanova presented a paper based on her recent research into the
cultural activities of Muslim migrants in Moscow. Two papers were presented on Soviet-era music: Daniel Elphick gave an incisive
analysis of the Socialist Realist strictures guiding Soviet chamber music, and Amrei Flechsig discussed the representation of laughter in Soviet operas.

Many of Ivashkin’s teaching and research activities were
related directly to performance studies, and this too was reflected in the
conference programme, with several friends and former pupils giving
performance-related presentations. Nicholas Walker discussed Balakirev’s piano
playing, Magdalini Nikolaidou the interpretation of Rachmaninov’s
Études-Tableaux, and Valerie Welbanks the extended techniques employed by
Roger Redgate in his Black Icons, a cello concerto written for Ivashkin. The
spirit of Ivashkin was particularly close in these
presentations—Ivashkin very often illustrated his talks with playing, on the
piano or the cello, moving fluidly between speaking and playing, and in several
instances here we were treated to similarly enlightening combinations. Also, in
the cello/performance category was a stimulating discussion from Rebecca Turner
about the cello music that Ivashkin commissioned and performed in his decade in
New Zealand in the 1990s. This was particularly valuable for its coverage of
this period of Ivashkin’s career, but also for how it demonstrated his
continual curiosity, coming to a new land and immediately engaging with the
musical culture there. Turner described how Ivashkin had worked closely with a
range of New Zealand composers as well as engaging with the traditional music
of Polynesian islanders.

Naturally, live
performances made up a significant part of the conference, and, as with the
talks, the music covered a broad range of Ivashkin’s musical interests and was
mainly presented by former colleagues and students. The highlight was Dmitri
Alexeev performing the Scriabin op. 11 Preludes—world-class piano playing of
the Russian school. On the subject of world famous Russian musicians, the Alexeev
performance was followed by the unveiling of a permanent memorial to Ivashkin
at Goldsmiths, a portrait of him with Mstislav Rostropovich on the occasion of
Rostropovich being awarded an honorary doctorate at the college. The other
recitals were given by former students and colleagues, focussing primarily on
Russian repertoire—Viktoria Zora, Elena Artamonova and Rebecca Turner gave an
excellent performance of the Schnittke String Trio, in a recital that also
included Prokofiev and Rachmaninov from Mikhail Bozylev, recipient of the
recently instigated Alexander Ivashkin Scholarship at Goldsmiths. A piano
recital by Andrew Zolinsky brought the post-Soviet connection right up to date,
with recent works by Mansurian, Knaifel and Silvestrov. I was particularly
drawn to the Knaifel Postludia, although most people I spoke to,
including the pianist himself, felt the Silvestrov Third Sonata was the
highlight of the programme. The Ligeti Quartet (of which Val Welbanks is
cellist) also ventured into adventurous territory with the John Cage Quartet in
Four Parts and Gubaidulina’s most recent work for string quartet, Reflections
on the Theme B-A-C-H.

A fitting
tribute, then, to the musical and scholarly activities of Alexander Ivashkin.
The programme often seemed to move in diverse and unrelated directions, but
this only served to demonstrate the sheer breadth of Ivashkin’s musical
interests. And the event closed with a performance that brought us right back to
the man himself—a solo cello recital of music close to his heart. The cellist
was Sebastian Hurtaud, a winner of the Adam Cello Competition in New Zealand,
which Ivashkin and Pavlutskaya founded. A Bach Cello Suite (No. 5) opened,
followed by Britten’s First Suite, which appears on Ivashkin’s very last
commercial recording. And to end, Klingende Buchstaben, a piece written for
Ivashkin by Alfred Schnittke and based on the letters of his name: A fitting
coda to a memorable and moving celebration. Clearly, Ivashkin’s legacy lives
on.

.

Gavin Dixon is a writer, journalist, editor and blogger specialising in classical music. He writes reviews and articles for a number of publications and websites. Gavin has a PhD on the Symphonies of Alfred Schnittke and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also a member of the editorial team behind the ‘Alfred Schnittke Collected Works’ edition, which recently began publication in St Petersburg. More information on Gavin’s writing activities can be found at his website: www.gavindixon.info